This Week On Twitter: Day In The Life Of The Internet, Social Personalities, TweetPee, Social Moms

Need a little weekend reading? We’ve compiled our top ten Twitter stories of the week, which includes a look at what happens over the course of a day on the internet, 10 social media personality types, a new Twitter-based sensor for diaper changing, a study which reveals how moms are using social media and thoughts on whether social media marketing has lost its way.

There are close to two and-a-half billion people online around the world – this number has grown a heady 566 percent since the year 2000 – and 70 percent of them use the internet each and every day. As you might imagine, with that kind of presence, which amounts to more than a third of the global population, quite a lot happens over the course of each 24 hours. You want some examples? You got it. Each day, an average of 139,344 new websites go live. An incredible 144 billion emails are sent and received. 500 million people log into Facebook. Hundreds of millions of tweets* are written and exchanged, and, perhaps most amazingly, 60 hours of new video are uploaded to YouTube every single minute.

When you’ve been active on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook for a lengthy period of time, you start to develop a personality. This may not be something you’re even aware of. It usually isn’t contrived (although sometimes it blatantly is), but many people, like it or not, become (or slip into the habits of) a certain type of user as they become a veteran of their favourite social media service(s) and, while this will inevitably fluctuate on occasion, they usually revert back to that tried-and-tested social norm once the madness has passed.

Brazilian parents just got a new gadget to add to their parenting arsenal: TweetPee, a sensor + Twitter-based alert Huggies has rolled out in Brazil. A sensor gets attached to the baby’s diaper, and when it perceives an increase in humidity it sends a tweet out to the parent’s Twitter account to let them know the baby needs to be changed.

Did you know that a recent study showed that almost half (44 percent) of moms have gone on to make a purchase after a friend posted a recommendation or liked a product on a social media site? We’ve been here before, of course (many times), but it bears repeating – moms and social media make a great mix, and if these socially savvy ladies are a demographic fit for your business then you should absolutely be engaging with them – frequently – within your marketing campaigns.

Remember when it was exciting to receive an email? An email. One. Because, maybe twenty years ago, your email inbox didn’t get an awful lot of action. Heck, you probably didn’t even refer to it as in inbox. It was just “my email”. Email zero as a concept did not exist, because it was a given. You received an email, and you read it. Done. No more email to read. Until the next time, which might be in another day or two. Of course, email now just part of your job. Something you have to do. And, accordingly and so often, impersonal, automated, and cold. Is this what’s happening to social media marketing, too?